Cognitive Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experiences

Neuroaesthetics is a field that explores the underlying cognitive neuroscience of aesthetic experiences. Human brains have intrinsic features that make us observe and value beauty.

Aesthetic features often influence people’s affective responses and behaviour. They affect which products consumers purchase, how humans respond to build and natural environments, and our attitudes towards and opinions of other people.

Current Western conceptions of art are influenced by thinkers like Kant and Shaftesbury. Art is distinct from other aspects of life and requires disinterested contemplation to engage with.

Non-Western societies have a wider range of objects and activities deemed aesthetic. Aesthetics is more closely linked to the communication of its ethical, spiritual, and philosophical meaning.

Though it’s hard to classify what counts as art or an aesthetic, Shusterman defined aesthetic experiences as having 3 features– an evaluative dimension placing a value on the object, a phenomenological or an affective dimension that is subjectively felt, and a semantic dimension to do with the underlying meaning.

Aesthetic experience is more concerned with subjective responses to art than the objective properties of art. It is distinct from other affective, reward-generating experiences in that it lacks the motivational drive to act.¹

This suggests that the emotional experiences involved in consuming art or aesthetics may neurologically be related to the reward system of liking or pleasure rather than the reward system of wanting to satisfy desires.

Neuroimaging evidence suggests that aesthetic experiences arise from the interaction among neural networks involved in sensory-motor, emotion valuation, and meaning-knowledge processing.²

A major insight that emerged is that the valuation of art, music, and other cultural objects, such as money, relies on the same neural mechanisms that mediate reward derived from food or drink, thus contributing to the notion of a “common currency” for choice.³

Neuroimaging also revealed that aesthetic experiences are related to activity of large-scale neural networks rather than specific regions.⁴ Facial attractiveness is processed even when people don’t explicitly attend or overtly respond to it.

Aesthetic judgements involve two stages– an early impression formation and a subsequent evaluative categorisation. ⁴

Recent studies show that aesthetic pleasure is characterised by the tight coupling of activity in reward brain regions and sensory brain regions.

A study⁵ found that peak musical experiences (listening pleasurably to familiar self-selected musical excerpts) were associated with dopaminergic activity in the caudate nucleus while the nucleus accumbens was involved in the anticipation of the peak experience. The experience itself and its anticipation appear to be served by dopamine release in distinct regions of the striatal system.

In a subsequent study⁶, that used a bidding paradigm, in which participants were asked to listen to unfamiliar fragments of music and allocate amounts of money to listen to them again if they wished.

The degree of activity in the nucleus accumbens and an increase in functional connectivity between this region and the auditory cortex, the amygdala, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex predicted the amount of money participants were willing to pay to listen to their preferred fragments again.

Understanding in more detail the relations between brain sub-systems and the extent to which they can be activated in isolation provides a rigorous empirical pathway toward distinguishing different varieties of aesthetic pleasure.

References:
1. Pearce et al, 2016
2. Chatterjee et al, 2014
3. Batra et al, 2013
4. Cela-Conde et al, 2014
5. Salimpoor et al, 2011
6. Salimpoor et al, 2013

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